Before she was CEO of Yahoo, and before she was a VP at Google,
Marissa Mayer was a software engineer.

"Yahoo is the most amazing design problem I've ever gotten to
work on," Mayer said on stage at Bloomberg's Technology
Conference.

When you first start to work on a company, Mayer says, it's a
design problem — which was the case at Yahoo. When you start growing your products and
trying to scale up and up, as Yahoo has been doing, that design
problem turns into an engineering problem.

"To me, when I look at [Yahoo's problems], I see engineering
problems," Mayer says. "Those principles apply to everything from
the culture of the company to how we grow our
products."

And she says that her
experience as an engineer helps her approach those issues — being
bold and trying to figure out what works and what
doesn't.

Mayer says that last year, for
example, was a year of "experimentation in terms of Yahoo's
content strategy, trying to figure out what people wanted to
watch on Yahoo's video channels — original content, news, short
clips, concerts streamed from Live Nation.

"It really helped us shape our
content," Mayer says. Now, the company can look at its successes
and ask "how do we build
even more content in that vein?"

In a larger sense, that
approach is driven by the fact that "engineers love data," Mayer
says. The risk is "analysis paralysis," as you learn too much
about everything to make good choices, but the reward is a
smarter company that can serve its customers better — and attract
more ad dollars.

In the past, Mayer says that
Yahoo's "Achilles heel" was that nobody knew if it was a
tech-driven media company or a media-driven tech company. Now,
Mayer says that it's a strength, since its love of data has made
it really good at both tech and data.

"We may not be the biggest technology company, but we're
the biggest technology company that understands media," Mayer
says. "We may not be the
biggest media company, but we're biggest media company that gets
tech."

As proof positive, Mayer points
to what she calls Yahoo's "historic" deal with the NFL to
broadcast the All-Star Game online, exclusively.

Still, while Mayer thinks the
engineering mindset has driven the company forward, she jokes
that nobody at Yahoo would be very happy if she picked up a
keyboard and sat down to code, preferring to leave it to the
product teams. But she does like to code at home every now and
then for fun.